Everything you need to plan an amazing vacation to Iceland!
Lots of travel these days as we make our way out of the Westfjords and down toward Reykjavik. We stayed close to Eiríksstaðir, a museum housed on the site of the longhouse home of Erik the Red and Leif the lucky. And so we had some time to visit there.
After a relaxing morning, we headed to take a factory tour of Saltverk. Founded 5 years ago, Saltverk has revived a 17th century process to extract salt from the ocean using geothermal energy. This process results in a “flaky” salt. When we got there, we weren’t sure we’d really found it:
We spent the day in Ísafjörður, the largest town in the Westfjords (population: 2,600). It’s a nice little town, with a lot of shops, bakeries, and cafes:
We spent the previous night in a small area called Laugar in Saelingsdal, and it turns out our accommodations were right next to a natural hot pot:
We started the day in Siglufjörður, the northernmost town in Iceland. The main draw here is the Herring Era Museum. This is an impressive place– 3 huge buildings housing ships, tools, and information about herring fishing and processing in this area.
While some of the family spent the day in Akureyri, the rest of us headed to Húsavík, the self-proclaimed whale capital of Iceland. On the way (well, only slightly out of the way) we stopped at Laufás, a museum featuring a turf house from the 1840s:
